Obama: Judgments on diversity 'premature'

1/14/13 1:15 PM EST

President Barack Obama, faced with questions about the diversity of his second-term Cabinet, asked that people wait until all of his appointments are made before making judgements.

"I'm very proud that in the first four years, we had as diverse -- if not more diverse -- a White House and a cabinet than any in history. And I intend to continue that," he said during a news conference on Monday. "...Until you’ve seen what my overall team looks like, it's premature to assume that somehow we're going backwards. We're not going backwards, we're going forward."

Obama's first big personnel announcements for his second term were the nominations of four white men -- Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) for state, former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) for defense, John Brennan for CIA director and Jack Lew for Treasury secretary. At the same time, high profile women are departing, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

"If you think about my first four years, the person who probably had the most incfluence on my forign policy was a woman; the people who were in charge of moving forward my most important domestic initiative, health care, were women; the person in charge of our homeland security was a woman.; my two appointments to the Supreme Court were women, and 50 percent of my White House staff were women," Obama said. "So I think people should expect that that record will be built on during the next fours years."